PROLOGUE9bodies, beauty, and grace did not develop in accordance with the canon of
classical ballet. Her posing as a specimen bore a claim of unprecedented
veridicality in art—one supported by a pronounced indexicality that made
this work of absolute importance to the series of artistic statements that
would follow in its footsteps.
Adding to the political proposal of Little Dancer was its exhibition in
Nadar’s photographic studio, a site in which the indexicality of photogra-
phy generated new economies of production and image consumption. Not
quite art, but neither quite fragment of the real world, photography, dur-
ing the nineteenth century, problematized previous histories of repre-
sentation, largely contributing to the emergence of new realisms and en-
abling unprecedented forms of criticality to arise.
At this stage, one might wonder why realism should constitute a nodal
point in the reception and assimilation of works of art. The history of
realism in western art is intrinsically bound to opticality, perception,
science, and philosophy. Optical realism has not been an essential com-
ponent of nonwestern art. Closer to the west, Egyptian funerary art
largely capitalized on symbolic synthesis. The Platonic conception of mi-
mesis saw resemblance as a process generating inferior and deceptive
copies that are progressively further removed from archetypal truths.
And classical Greek sculpture (480–330 bce) surely employed optical re-
alism not only to tell universal truths but also to seduce the eye of the
spectator while normalizing moral and ethical values—classical sculp-
ture embodied an erotic/homoerotic essence according to which atten-
tion to detail and idealization of form became aesthetic parameters of
paramount importance. Thereafter, during the Middle Ages, optical re-
alism, or that which is also known as naturalism, dissipated. The hyper-
simplified flatness and hierarchical compositions of Gothic and Byzan-
tine art privileged clarity, symbolism, and narrative structure over
optical sensuality. This shift away from optical realism should not be un-
derstood as a lack of realism, but as the epistemic manifestation of a
new and different register of realism—one that was substantially de-
fined by the word of God and by the power/knowledge relations from
which the works of art emerged. Thereafter, optical realism returned to
occupy a prominent role in the Renaissance because of the revival of
Greek philosophy and classical art and because of the increasing impor-
tance of patrons who commissioned works of art and who wanted to